Voices: We may have ‘got’ Alex Jones – but there are so many more out there

One of the oddest things to come out of the dreadful Alex Jones affair is the routine description of him as “radio host and conspiracy theorist”, as if this was some novel branch of the media; like “reality TV personality”, “vlogger” or “TikTok star”. It isn’t.

Conspiracy theories are not legitimate. The theorists are not some sort of brave band of warriors for liberty. Alex Jones peddled disgusting untruths about the Sandy Hook shootings. Simple and grim as that. He traded on human gullibility and was careless about the misery he caused. He got what he deserves.

Jones made a living out of this disreputable activity. He founded the Infowars website and talk show, and argued that the Sandy Hook massacre was actually a “staged” government plot to take guns from Americans and that “no-one died”.

It was fake news, to put it mildly. He inflicted enormous emotional hurt to the families and survivors of the shootings at the Sandy Hill Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. Some 26 died, of whom 20 were children of six or seven. As their lawyer put it: “When every single one of these families were drowning in grief, Alex Jones put his foot right on top of them.”

Jones has since acknowledged he was wrong, argued he was motivated by a sort of defensive impulse on behalf of gun owners – and stated the massacre was “100 per cent real”.

At long last, he has been dragged out from behind his “free speech” defence and ordered to pay almost a billion dollars in damages to his – Jones’s – victims. Some form of justice has been meted out. It’s not much, given everything, but it’s what has to be done when people such as Jones abuse their human rights to free speech and expression.

Even so, there’s not that much remorse from Jones. He is as defiant as you’d expect from his public persona. There’s a clip of him in the courtroom refusing to apologise to the families because he says he’s apologised enough already: “I’ve already said I’m sorry hundreds of times and I’m done saying I’m sorry”.

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Jones has put himself out there, watching a tape of the jury’s verdict and mocking the court proceedings. Urgent donations have already been asked of his followers – and he says these funds will not go towards his legal costs: “The money does not go to these people” (his words), adding, “it goes to fight this fraud and it goes to stabilise the company.” His lawyer added that he will appeal the decision. “We look very much forward to an appeal in this case. Candidly from start to finish, the fix was in this case. We disagree with the basis of the default, we disagree with the Court’s evidentiary rulings. In more than 200 trials in the course of my career, I’ve never seen a trial like this,” the lawyer said outside the court.

The shame of it is that the Jones case is in fact the exception to the rule – there are so many others out there on social media and traditional media freely indulging in unhinged, dangerous conspiracy theories. These lies aren’t “alternative facts”, “radical viewpoints” or “independent thinking”; but dangerous packages of malicious propaganda broadcast for goodness knows what purpose except, all too often, the abuse of free speech for monetary gain.

The climate crisis deniers, the anti-vaxxers, the Covid denialists, the folk who believe the World Economic Forum is a shady world government, the antisemitic tropesters (sadly such as Kanye West), the Soros-haters, the ones who think Bill Gates controls our minds, the racial supremacists, the ones who think 5G poles are evil, the Qanonists, the ones who think Donald Trump was on a crusade against a global elite paedophile ring (it’s always global elites), the anti-lizard David Ickes and the likes… all doing untold harm every second of every day on the internet.

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To some, I guess, Jones is a bit of a hero, a martyred free-thinking sceptic whose only crime was to get caught. They might, to be fair, also think he got things wrong – but he should still have the right to say them with impunity. That’s what the “free speech fundamentalists” seem to believe, and some also make a profit from. Jones was, after all, good at it.

But it was fake news, to put it mildly. In principle and outline, it is not so very different to the other mad conspiracy theories that infect our lives – the pandemic of bizarre theories with ever more virulent variants and sub-variants evolving and reproducing. The structures of social media foster this exponential spread. Jones and the Sandy Hook conspiracists may have been discredited, but there is much, much more where that came from.

It’s corrosive and deadly, but seemingly near unstoppable. A depressing truth, that, but a truth all the same. That’s the real conspiracy, it seems – a global network of nutters trying to kill the truth.